The present disclosure generally relates to a method and to a system for in-vitro diagnostic analysis involving pipetting of reagents.
In analytical laboratories, in particular in-vitro diagnostic laboratories, a multitude of analyses on biological samples are executed in order to determine physiological and biochemical states of patients, which can be indicative of a disease, nutrition habits, drug effectiveness, organ function and the like.
Sample processing throughput, i.e., the number of biological samples analyzed per hour, as well as the number of different tests that can be carried out, are generally important. For laboratories handling thousands of samples each day, a small delay for each individual sample makes a substantial difference in terms of overall laboratory efficiency.
In order to meet this demand, optimal hardware design and efficient workflow planning are required when developing an automated system for in-vitro diagnostics. In particular, an automated system for in-vitro diagnostic analysis may be required to execute a large number of scheduled process operations, which are repeated at intervals called cycle times and it is important that the cycle times at parity of process operations be as short as possible in order to maximize throughput. Also, it is frequent that different tests require different test conditions, for example, different reaction times, different types of reagents, different volumes, different detection times, and the like. Thus, the system should be also able to dynamically adapt the scheduled workflow due to the various test requirements and variable sequence of test orders and be able to respond quickly to anomalies, errors due to unexpected events, and the like.
Therefore, this is a need for an in-vitro diagnostic analysis system and method that achieves higher processing throughput and workflow efficiency by a programmed control of functional units operating synergistically in parallel on different samples across different cycle times while enabling a time-saving anticipation of subsequent workflow operations.